First Loop Story (2)
And so the blood-soaked march dragged on until one more club member was offered up as a sacrifice in yet another horrific tragedy. Only then did we finally reach the next house in the village.
Watching the reactions of the members the president had abandoned, I learned something: extreme pain could snap them back to their senses.
And that realization made me want to vomit.
They wandered around out of their minds, only to regain clarity at the very moment of death—trapped in a situation where escape was already impossible. Forced to stay lucid through every raw second of agony, they felt each detail of those disgusting methods of execution. The thought alone left my head spinning.
Is this okay? No… wouldn’t it be better if it weren’t?
If they’re going to die like this anyway, wouldn’t it be kinder to stay unconscious?
My perception started to twist. In that instant I bent my finger backward until it nearly snapped, forcing myself awake through the pain.
That was how I held the encroaching madness at bay—with pain—and kept following wherever the president led us.
Once, a golden dagger caught my eye. I reached for it, but the president must have sensed something off; he whipped around so fast I fumbled the grab and, in a panic, snatched the strange silver pocket watch lying beside it instead, stuffing it hastily into my pocket.
In another house one of us was swallowed whole inside a room overflowing with filthy coins. Another screamed as he plummeted into a bottomless pit swarming with flies. I had to watch every second of it, clear-eyed and present.
The endless, madness-soaked procession finally left only three of us: me, Yeom Sang-hyeon, and the president. We headed for the next house.
Halfway through the village the president suddenly began to tremble and stopped dead in his tracks. I tensed at the inexplicable behavior, but the shaking didn’t look like a simple seizure—it looked like he was fighting something inside himself.
As if he had read my mind, the president turned to me and spoke.
“Senior… you’re awake, right? I… I can’t keep holding this body still much longer. Hurry up and… kill me.”
I had been trailing at the rear. At those words I staggered forward and reached for the kitchen knife in his hand.
Before I could even react he spun and slashed. I never knew how I dodged—only that the blade still caught me. Pure instinct sent me scrambling sideways.
A hot sting flared in my side. I pressed a hand there, then brought it up in front of my eyes. Bright crimson blood stained my palm in sharp, vivid streaks.
The president threw his head back and cackled like a maniac.
“You fell for that? I figured you’d be tricky since you seemed awake this whole time—hihihihihihihihihihihihi!”
Yeom Sang-hyeon, who had been trembling as if seized by convulsions ever since Greed’s House, suddenly let out a monstrous roar and charged the president. Caught off guard, the president struggled to hold him off.
Blood vessels had burst in Yeom Sang-hyeon’s eyes; bloody tears streamed down his face. Whether from sheer willpower or something else, he kept coming even as the kitchen knife stabbed him again and again. Fist after fist finally drove the president to the ground.
The howls and the reek of blood drew several of the killers closer. I hesitated—just for a second. That single pause was enough. A murderer slipped up behind me and drove a knife into the opening.
I twisted, trying to dodge, but the jagged blade still punched into my shoulder, then ripped free, tearing muscle as it went.
Yeom Sang-hyeon shouted my name. Reflex took over; I ran without thinking. Behind me he kept calling until the very end, screaming for me to get away.
In the middle of that frantic flight I ran straight into the Black Goat. It chased me, and in complete ignorance of where I was going I fled into the grand mansion at the center of the village.
Only after I stepped inside did I realize I had entered a place I should never have entered.
Darkness beyond comprehension seethed everywhere. The ceiling, the ancient jars scattered about, the frames hanging on the walls—all of it became a grotesque chorus that seemed to jab straight into my skull.
The moment I opened the door it slammed shut behind me with a heavy clack, locking tight.
—Crunch.
I was still shaking the handle when something gave with a wet, crushing sound. A burning pain flared in my hand. Looking down, I saw the door handle chewing on the little finger of my left hand.
It was absurdly contradictory, yet the madness the mansion’s scenery tried to pour into my mind was driven back by the raw agony of that bitten finger. I clamped my good hand around the ruined digit and ran—anywhere my feet would take me.
I sprinted down a corridor that seemed to stretch forever until a fork appeared. To the left, a painting of the deep sea hung on the wall. Something inside it rippled with ominous life. Unidentifiable liquid spilled over the frame and splattered onto the floor; a shape twisted and strained, trying to haul itself out of the canvas.
Just looking at that motion was enough to shatter sanity. Before the thing could fully emerge I jammed my thumb hard against the mangled stump of my severed finger and bolted down the right-hand corridor instead.
Pain and receding madness kept time with each other as I forced my reeling mind back under control and ran. I raced through that sinister hallway soaked in madness that could twist reason with a mere glance. Glancing out a side window, I saw the ground far below, tiny and distant—I was already on the third floor, not the first.
Running alone was hard enough, but the living horrors lurking in every corner of the corridor kept pouring out madness that warped my thoughts. I kept pressing the ruined finger, using the pain to claw my way back to clarity again and again. By the time I finished that cycle of drowning and resurfacing, my whole body was drenched in cold sweat as if I had taken a shower.
I ran until my lungs felt ready to burst. Swallowing wave after wave of rising nausea, I tore down the spinning, lightless halls. An open black door loomed ahead; I tumbled through it, fell, and kicked the door shut with my foot.
I tried to stand again, but all I managed was to slide down and sit with my back against the door. I lifted my eyes to take in the room, yet everything was already too blurred to see clearly.
I sat there a while, trying to move, until the nausea finally won and I retched. Something thick spilled from my mouth with a ragged breath and hit the floor. Looking down through the haze, I saw a strange dark-red mass of slime.
My insides itched. I forced air in and out through whistling, labored breaths. There was no part of me that didn’t hurt. My left shoulder looked as if it had been worked over with a saw—ragged and shredded—and the little finger of my left hand was simply gone. My vision stayed too fogged to focus.
“…Falling for that… am I just… a complete idiot…?”
I kept muttering to myself while slumped against the wall, half self-mockery. If I stopped talking I felt I would lose consciousness at once. In pure desperation I stretched out a hand and flailed. The raw stump of my left little finger scraped across a book on a nearby shelf. Fresh pain flared, buying me another fleeting moment of clarity.
I tried to wriggle the finger, squeezing out the last of my strength, but all I managed was to keep hold of the book. I had nothing left to move my body with.
“…Should’ve just… transferred schools…”
The final mutter mixed with the sound of air leaking from my whistling lungs. I toppled sideways. The book slipped from my grip and tumbled to the floor. At the same time, far down the corridor, the dull thud of hooves striking the floorboards began to echo, faint but growing closer.
…
…
…
..
.
My eyes caught the book as it fell open on the floor. I flinched. Bizarre knowledge began pouring straight into my mind. I tried to turn my head, tried to roll my eyes away—yet the strange letters on the open pages seemed to pin my body in place.
The black characters writhed of their own accord, twisting as they forcibly crammed unknowable, forbidden knowledge into my skull. My consciousness sank into an irresistible madness, as if I were drowning in an endless desert of black sand.
At the same time the wound on my shoulder began to change—turning into black sand that spread outward, slowly converting my body into the same dark grains. Pages flipped by themselves. Unspeakable knowledge and power rose damply inside me.
Thoughts flooded in all at once: what I should have done the moment I arrived here, how I should have acted. Even the contents of the suspicious contract the escape-room manager had shoved at me—things that had made no sense before—began to click into place one by one.
My throat… burned…
It felt so dry I coughed, and black stones and sand that glowed with an unnatural light spilled from my mouth. Thirst clawed at me. Wisdom I never wanted to understand piled higher in my head, forcing me to comprehend the very situation unfolding right now.
As the price for looking upon a forbidden book I was never meant to see, my body began changing from human into something else. And when the transformation finished—when nothing human remained in me—I would never return. An eternal hell would begin. That fact settled into my mind as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
I groped frantically, thrashing in every direction, desperate to escape the hell that was already scheduled. The meaningless struggle brought my hand into contact with the pocket watch I had stuffed into my pocket earlier.
In that same instant I realized the knowledge flooding my mind had stopped cold. The power that had been spreading without end vanished from my body. The madness boring into my thoughts disappeared completely.
I blinked.
When my senses returned I found myself standing by the curtains inside Envy’s House, blinking in confusion.
Someone shouted from behind me.
“What the hell!”